March 23, 2015

An estimated 2% of the population makes more than $250,000 (that's per person, not household income).
It’s easy to forget what the average person really makes amid big-money talk of billion-dollar writedowns and executive pay packages in the millions. But in 2006, the median household income in the U.S. amounted to just over $48,000 (that's household income, not per person income). Even if you take out those just starting their careers and only count workers older than 25, the median household income is still about $53,000. That’s the true middle of the spectrum.
On the far end are the richest American households, or those who make more than $250,000 a year. These are America’s elite. The Mercedes-Benz-driving, Coach-bag-carrying set. Only the top 2% of households in the U.S. pull down that kind of cash.
Also, the people in this tax bracket don’t just make 250 grand and then stop. They are in the $250,000-and-up (and up and up and up) bracket. And it’s this group that has reaped most of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts.
To be sure, recent economic events have not left anyone’s wallet bursting. And rising food and fuel prices are raising everyone’s cost of living. But the top income earners in America don’t deserve much sympathy. In addition to the obvious fact that they have more money to spend than lower-income people, as a proportion of their income, the amount richer people pay for food, fuel, and education is smaller. Feeding a family of four takes the same amount of food whether you make 30 grand or 300 grand. Ditto with paying for fuel to drive said family to school and work or for a college education. Higher prices for necessities hurt the truly disadvantaged more. [Source]

Household
income is affected by a variety of factors, such as population aging and
household composition.
U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939 in
2013 versus $51,759 in 2012, essentially unchanged. However, it has
trended down since 2007, falling 8% from the pre-recession peak of
$56,436. It remains well below the 1999 record of $56,895. This long-term decline in income
is troubling to economists, especially as the middle and lower classes
have fared considerably worse than the rich. Since 1967, Americans right
in the middle of the income curve have seen their earnings rise 19%,
while those in the top 5% have seen a 67% gain. Rising inequality is seldom a sign of good social stability. [Source] [Source]

Wall Street and the top of corporate America are doing extremely well
as of June 2011. For example, in Q1 of 2011, America's top
corporations reported 31% profit growth and a 31% reduction in taxes,
the latter due to profit outsourcing to low tax rate countries.
Somewhere around 40% of the profits in the S&P 500 come from
overseas and stay overseas, with about half of these 500 top
corporations having their headquarters in tax havens. If the
corporations don't repatriate their profits, they pay no U.S. taxes.
The year 2010 was a record year for compensation on Wall Street, while
corporate CEO compensation rose by over 30%, most Americans struggled.
In 2010 a dozen major companies, including GE, Verizon, Boeing, Wells
Fargo, and Fed Ex paid US tax rates between -0.7% and -9.2%.
Production, employment, profits, and taxes have all been outsourced.
Major U.S. corporations are currently lobbying to have another
"tax-repatriation" window like that in 2004 where they can bring back
corporate profits at a 5.25% tax rate versus the usual 35% US corporate
tax rate. Ordinary working citizens with the lowest incomes are taxed
at 10%.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex
set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by
those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows
them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the
U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real
wealth. [Source]

After the unending media coverage of the fiscal cliff
throughout December 2012, it was a relief to everyone when a
last-minute compromise was reached. In particular, the most reported-on
compromise had to do with the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.
Those cuts will remain in place permanently for any individual making
less than $400,000 per year, and for couples earning less than $450,000.
Those fortunate few who make more than that amount will see their rates
rise from 35% to 39.6%.

The news about this particular tax rate increase got me wondering:
what professions can expect to earn that kind of money? Since I don’t
personally know anyone bringing home $400,000 per year, I decided to
find out what kind of jobs command such high salaries:

1. The President

Perhaps the most famous $400,000 per year job is the leader of the
free world. The office of president not only pays a $400,000 annual
salary, but also provides the president with a $50,000 annual expense
account, a $100,000 nontaxable travel account, and a $19,000
entertainment account.

There are some obvious downsides to this particular career, however.
Besides being very difficult to get, the job is highly stressful, and
advancement post-office can be considered somewhat iffy. And, of course,
you can’t expect regular raises:
the last salary increase for the commander-in-chief (from $200,000 to
the current rate) was in 2001. Prior to that, the previous raise (from
$100,000) occurred in 1969.

2. Surgeons and specialists

Even a local general practitioner can expect to pull in over $100,000
per year, but the real money in medicine is reserved for those who
specialize. Anesthesiologists, heart surgeons, and brain surgeons can
all expect to make up to $400,000 per year at the height of their
career. Plastic surgeons can make up to twice that amount.

3. CEOs

The median salary of a Chief Executive Officer is over $700,000.
These directors are in charge of both short- and long-term profitability
for their companies. CEOs generally have to know the industry backwards
and forwards (although there are certainly plenty of counter-examples),
and need to have worked their way up over many years.

4. Wall Street Bankers and Lawyers

If you work in either finance or finance law, the place to go for fat paychecks is Wall Street. According to an October 2012 report,
“the average salary of financial industry employees in New York City
rose to $362,950 in 2011.” While that still falls short of the mark
required for the higher tax bracket,
it’s important to remember that this figure represents the average
(meaning some people are making more) and that there have almost
certainly been raises in the past year and a half.

The Top Percent of the Top Percent

These high-income earners are really rare. Consider the fact that
most articles listing the highest paying jobs in America don’t even
include any professions with median salaries of $400,000. Those
individuals making $400,000 per year are in the top one percent of the top one percent — and often, they’re also public figures.

Thankfully, even though individuals in this bracket are few and far between, the government estimates that raising the tax rate on this small group will raise about $600 billion in new revenues over the next decade.
Not bad for a group that small.

C. Wright Mills’ 1956 classic work, The Power Elite, only mentions “investment banker” one time, never refers to “Wall Street,”
talks about wealth as a measure of personal freedom, but mentions
millionaire” only once and never “billionaire.”

In the 1950s the Power
Elite were CEOs of old industrial and consumer product companies like General Electric,
boards of directors, generals, admirals, Social Register types like the
Vanderbilts and Ivy League social clubs and fraternities. There was no
such thing as the Forbes 400 list or Occupy Wall Street or Too Big to
Fail Banks. There was a Power Elite, but a far more quaint Power Elite.

“The families of about half of the 1950 executives settled in America
before the revolution,” Mills claimed in his trail-blazing work about
“men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments
of ordinary men and women.”

Today’s Power Elite are the CEOs of major financial institutions, like Jamie Dimon of J.P.Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein
of Goldman Sachs. They are the band of Private Equity plutocrats like
Apollo’s Leon Black, who took home $560 million last year, or
Blackstone’s Steve Schwartzman or KKR’s Henry Kravis or Carlyle’s David
Rubinstein. Not to speak of the dozens of Hedge Fund billionaires like
George Soros and the activist investor band, about whom the financial
media are positively giddy.

They are the very top echelon of the 300,000
wealthy investors who make up the 1/10th of 1% of America who collect
each year over 60% of the capital gains, taxed at far less than ordinary
income.

They use their influence to block attempts to limit the
leverage of large financial institutions, to maintain the favorable
carried interest tax treatment, and to prevent Elizabeth Warren from
becoming head of a new consumer finance oversight organization.

Today’s Power Elite are the vanguard of the “economic elites and
organized groups representing business interests (that) have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens
and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence,”
according to one academic study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizen by
Martin Gilens, a Princeton professor and Benjamin Page of Northwestern.
(Soon to be published.) This claim of policy implementation by powerful
groups follows in the tradition of the Winner Takes All Politics of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson that stirred up controversy some years ago.

By now the nation has woken up to the power of campaign contributions
and lobbying money as attributes of today’s Power Elite as confirmed by
the Supreme Court decision Citizens Union, which allows unlimited funds
to be contributed on issues of concern to the business community.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth Warren, the populist candidate for Massachusetts
Senator, won election going away with the support of labor, women and
other ethnic and interest groups that did not fear her desire to break
up the largest financial institutions.

Contrary to the popular view that 1% of America is gaining almost all
the wealth created in the 21st century comes the discovery by economist Gail Fosler that “the overwhelming share of wealth in America is held in owner-occupied housing and retirement-related assets.” Sure, we have a
small class of the super rich whom we celebrate for the most part. But,
writes Fosler in her Financial Dynamics & Stability brief,
“things are not as unequal as they seem. Retirement needs are one
possible reason that this remarkable accumulation of wealth has not
resulted in a boom in inheritances.” Wealth, Fosler has ruled, “is a
necessary evil, one that we not only need more of but which we need to
understand better.”

In 2013 Goldman Sachs announced that it would launch a new mutual fund that
will let regular investors do what the billionaires are said to do:
invest in hedge funds. As Barry Ritholtz explains in a terrific article in the Washington Post, this is not good news. Once upon a time, hedge funds earned their outsize compensation by,
guess what? Hedging their investments. This risk-mitigation strategy
reduced the gains when markets were up but avoided some of the losses
when markets were down. Today, most hedge funds have morphed into something very different:
aggressive, highly-leveraged, speculative vehicles that are desperately
chasing returns to outperform their benchmarks that make huge returns
for the managers regardless of the fund’s performance and end up
transferring wealth from investors to hedge fund managers. [Source]

In Rhode Island, state treasure Gina Raimondo's strategy for saving public pensions involved handing more than $1
billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a
trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital
was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and
$70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now
stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year
by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke
state. [Source]

CNBC.com
September 28, 2014

The rich keep getting richer in hedge fund land.

A new investigation of industry assets by Absolute Return reveals that, once again, the largest funds are controlling more assets than ever.

The publication's twice-yearly Billion Dollar Club
analysis, which ranks the assets of all Americas-based firms with at
least $1 billion in hedge fund strategies, increased to 305 firms that
managed $1.84 trillion as of July 1, up from 293 firms that managed
$1.71 trillion at the start of 2014.

Bridgewater Associates remains the largest hedge fund manager in the Americas, followed by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Och-Ziff Capital Management and BlackRock.

Two-thirds of Billion Dollar Club firms gained in
size this year, with average assets up 8.38 percent in the past six
months, according to AR. Interestingly, the publication found
that the 50 largest firms lagged that broader growth rate, increasing
assets by only 7.76 percent.

Ray Dalio's
Bridgewater bucked that trend, adding more than anyone—$6.6 billion—to
its hedge fund strategies in the first half of 2014. The firm also recently disclosed that it is launching a new "Optimal
Portfolio" strategy that will likely push assets even higher
(Bridgewater manages $163 billion overall including non-hedge fund
assets).

Hedge funds of all sizes are now back past their
pre-crisis peak. Global hedge fund assets now stand at $2.869 trillion
as of July 1, according to a separate assessment by HedgeFund Intelligence. The previous record was $2.697 trillion in June 2008.

Hedge
funds are privately controlled and notoriously secretive investment
firms with billions of dollars in assets. Here's a document listing all
of the income, salaries, and spending for one hedge fund over several
years.

This document, provided to us by a source, is an internal spreadsheet from a New York hedge fund called TPG-Axon Capital, showing its income and costs for the years 2005-2010. The firm is headed by Dinakar Singh,
formerly a highly placed partner at Goldman Sachs.

When shown the
document, TPG-Axon spokesperson Mary Lee told us, "The document is not
authentic, nor do the numbers make sense." Lee did not reply to a
request for more specific details about what was incorrect or inaccurate
about the document and its data.

Our source provided us with corroborating documents supporting our source's claim that this document is genuine.

The chart
shows the compensation for the fund's three "Original Partners," as well
as for its "Investment Team," which numbered in the neighborhood of 30
people during the latter years shown on the chart.

We provide
this document simply as an illustration of the numbers behind the
operation of a hedge fund, both before, during, and after the economic
collapse of 2008. We encourage those of you with financial expertise to
pore over this document and leave your observations in the discussion
section below. We will note just a few things:

• For a
concrete demonstration of why the average American cannot understand our
nation's tax laws, look no further than the discrepancy between what
this firm paid in taxes, and what the partners walked away with each
year. In 2007, for example, the firm's total taxes were $1.67 million,
while the total "Distributions" to the firm's Original Partners came to
$461.4 million. [Clearly, the firm's taxes don't include the income tax
(or "carried interest" tax,
which is far lower than a normal person's income tax rate) that would
be paid on those distributions. Still, the gap between the revenue
generated by the firm and the taxes it pays out as a line item seem
jaw-dropping to the naked eye. We encourage any tax or finance
professionals to weigh in on these numbers with a further explanation.]

• What
could "partner discretionary" expenses—totaling over $1.6 million in
2008—possibly include, that does not fall in any of the other listed
categories? (Notice that the "Entertainment" category was not added
until 2010.) You'll have to guess.

• The
employees were apparently quite well fed. In 2009, for example, the firm
spend $837,000 on "Office Catering," in addition to $209,000 on "Pantry
Supplies."

•
Interesting expenditures for 2007: $17,000 on Parking, vs. $535,000 on
"Car Service" that same year; and $33,000 in "Gifts." What were the
gifts? Not parking spots, presumably.

• It's not
hard to tell that the firm's fortune's declined after 2009. In 2009,
they spent $39,000 on flowers; in 2010, they spent nothing on flowers.

• You can
calculate a rough ballpark figure for the total amount of money the firm
was managing by assuming thattotal "Management Fees" in a year are
between 1.5%-2% of total assets under management. For 2008, for example,
that would mean that the firm was managing something like $15 billion.

• We're
told that the "2010 Lights On" category is a scenario constructed to
discuss how deep expenses could realistically be cut for the year of
2010, when things stopped going so well. It is hypothetical.

One of the most famous names
in finance, Rothschild, is planning to raise a $711 million investment
fund as it welcomes chairman David de Rothschild’s son to the firm. The private bank’s investment vehicle will buy minority stakes in closely held companies, valued
at $142 million to $711 million, with
fundraising expected to be completed by year’s end. Marc-Olivier
Laurent, Emmanuel Roth and Javed Khan, who came over from the Blackstone Group in June, will manage the new fund. Also coming aboard to help with the
fund is Alexandre de Rothschild, David de Rothschild’s son, entering the
family business from European leveraged buyout shop Argan Capital. Rothschild marketing the new vehicle as fundraising for private equity is once again starting to pick up. Over
the past two months, U.S. private equity firms put more than $11
billion under management; while other firms are targeting another $10
billion.

BloombergOriginally Published on September 2, 2009

Rothschild, the largest family-owned bank,
plans to raise a 500 million-euro ($711 million) investment fund as
chairman David de Rothschild’s son joins the firm, two people familiar
with the plan said.

Alexandre de Rothschild, 29, moved to the family bank from Argan Capital, Bank of America Corp.’s former European private equity division,
to work on the project, said the people, who declined to be identified
before the fundraising is completed. Rothschild Managing Director
Marc-Olivier Laurent, 57, will oversee the fund, the people said.

The two-century-old firm, which is run
by 66-year-old David de Rothschild, plans to buy minority stakes in
closely held companies after the pace of global mergers and acquisitions
dropped 46 percent in the past year.The fund’s backers include Rothschild partners and clients. It will target companies valued at 100 million euros to 500 million euros, the people said.

“It’s normal for them to bring in family members to ensure succession,”
said Anis Bouayad, founder of Paris-based advisory firm AB Conseils.
“The bank has always found a way to promote its own, while also bringing
outside talent to the top jobs.”

Javed Khan, who joined Rothschild from New York-based private equity firm Blackstone Group LP in June,
and Emmanuel Roth, a former executive at investment firm Paris-Orleans,
will also manage the fund, the people said. Rothschild plans to
complete the fundraising before the end of the year, they said.

‘Family is Fine’

“In a business, the key is to have the best people,” David de Rothschild said in a 2005 interview, addressing the subject of succession. “The family is fine as long as they do a good job. If they don’t, it has to be someone else.”

David de Rothschild took managerial control of the U.K. side of the bank
after his cousin Evelyn retired in 2004, cementing control of both the
Paris and London businesses by a French Rothschild, a first for the
family firm.

David’s younger brother, Edouard, stepped down in 2004 after helping to
expand the French bank. Today, he oversees France Galop, the country’s
horse-racing association. David’s cousin, Eric, is chairman of
Rothschild’s asset-management and private-banking units and also runs
the family’s Chateau Lafite vineyard.

Mayer Amschel, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, started out
buying and selling old coins in a Frankfurt Jewish ghetto in the late
1700s and built an embryonic banking business by extending credit to
clients.In the early 1800s, he sent his five sons to establish bases in London, Paris, Naples and Vienna, in addition to Frankfurt.

His great-great-grandson, Guy de Rothschild, rebuilt the French business
in the 1950s and 1960s after reclaiming the bank, which had been seized
by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. In 1981, the French bank was nationalized
by Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. Two years later, David
persuaded the French government to grant the Rothschilds a new banking
license.

Elite private investors are buying up major companies at a record
pace in a wave of deals that is raining riches on Wall Street, but also
may be raising the risk of a financial bust.

Investors led by Blackstone Group announced late Sunday the
biggest takeover ever by a so-called private equity fund, a $36-billion
deal to buy Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest U.S. owner of
office buildings.

The proposed purchase follows announcements in recent months of buyouts that would put firms including
radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., casino titan Harrah's
Entertainment Inc., and food-service company Aramark Corp. in private hands, taking their shares off the stock market.

Takeovers are nothing new in American business, but historically the
largest deals have involved companies whose shares are publicly traded
buying other companies.This year, the buyers behind the biggest deals are private equity funds -- run by generally secretive investment firmsthat raise money from pension funds, wealthy individuals, and other
investors who are hungry for double-digit returns on their capital.

"It's obviously a boom," said C. Kevin Landry, a managing director at TA
Associates, a Boston-based private equity firm. "You can raise as much
money as you want" to do deals.

A private equity fund typically buys a company using mostly borrowed
money, then seeks to improve the firm's bottom line through measures
that may include refocusing the business or forcing cost cuts. The goal
is to eventually sell the firm to another company, or take it public
again, at a fat profit.

The buyout wave is enriching company shareholders because private equity
investors usually pay more than a stock's current price to clinch a
deal. That is helping to drive share prices higher overall, analysts
say; the Dow Jones industrial average has been hitting record highs.

Yet the surge in buyouts this year is making some on Wall Street
wonder whether they're witnessing a replay of other episodes when too
many investors threw too much money in the same direction -- the dot-com
boom of the late 1990s, for example, or a late-1980s company buyout
wave led by corporate raiders. Both of those booms gave way to painful busts.

"It's sort of feeding on itself now," said Edward Yardeni, investment
strategist at money management firm Oak Associates in Akron, Ohio. "You could make a pretty good case that a bubble is building in private equity, and that it will burst."

Private equity buyers have announced
about 1,000 U.S. takeovers this year worth a record $356 billion, according to data tracker Thomson Financial. That dwarfs the $138 billion in such deals announced last year.

Private-fund deals still account for a minority of U.S. takeover
activity. In all, the value of announced corporate takeovers this year
exceeds $1.2 trillion; most of those are company-to-company deals. But the rising clout of private equity buyers shows in the sizes of the deals they're behind, experts say.

Five of the six top deals this year are
private equity. That's never happened before," said Richard Peterson, an analyst at Thomson Financial in New York.

Most private equity firms aren't household names, but more may be on
their way to that status as their corporate assets balloon. Big
players include Blackstone, Bain Capital, Carlyle Group, Silver Lake
Partners and Texas Pacific Group. One -- Kohlberg Kravis Roberts &
Co. -- became famous for its massive deals in the 1980s.
More than any other factor, the ascendance of private equity buyers over
the last few years reflects the willingness of well-heeled investors to
pony up mountains of cash in search of better returns than they can
earn in stocks or bonds.

"There is tremendous liquidity in the market," said Brad Freeman, a
23-year buyout fund veteran whose Los Angeles-based firm, Freeman Spogli
& Co., has a $1-billion private equity fund it's putting to work.
"Deals are being done because they can be."

Private equity firms have raised an
unprecedented $178 billion in new capital from investors this year,
about 10 times what they raised in 1995, according to data firm Dealogic. The cash comes from investors such as the California
Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation's largest
public pension fund.

CalPERS has about $6.3 billion invested in buyout funds, said Joncarlo
Mark, a senior portfolio manager. The pension plan expects to earn an
annual percentage return in the upper teens on that money, he said. By
contrast, U.S. blue-chip stocks have generated a return of 11.4% a year
over the last three years.

"There are a lot of investors out there looking for yield," said Josh Lerner, a finance professor at Harvard University.

But the success of buyout deals depends in large part on the purchased
companies' ability to handle the debt loads they take on with their new
owners.

With many private equity funds wielding huge war chests, competition to
acquire companies has become fierce, said Stephen Presser, a partner at
private equity firm Monomoy Capital Partners in New York.

"At the moment, private equity firms are paying almost historically high
prices for businesses, and are depending on those businesses to
continue to grow in order to pay down their debt," Presser said. "If the economy softens -- and someday it will -- those companies are going to have a tough time" managing their debt loads.

Some analysts also question whether companies that are targets of
private equity buyers today can be substantially improved by their new
owners.

"Companies already are under so much pressure to be lean and mean," Yardeni said. "It's not clear what they're [private equity owners] going to bring to the table to make these companies more profitable."

Still, corporate managers often are happy to attract private equity buyers.
One reason is that top managers often participate as investors in
buyouts, with the potential to reap hefty financial rewards if the
company is eventually sold at a profit.

The costs and regulatory hassles of being a public company also are spurring corporate boards down the go-private road, said Scott Honour, a managing director at Gores Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles.

"Companies are bogged down by Sarbanes-Oxley requirements," he said,
referring to the law Congress passed in 2002 tightening regulation of
public companies after the financial scandals at Enron Corp. and other
firms.

That worries the Bush administration. In a speech Monday, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. questioned whether the going-private trend might signal that U.S. regulation of shareholder-owned companies had become too severe,and was driving them out of the public market.

The deal wave also has attracted the attention of another branch of the
government: The Justice Department reportedly is looking into the power wielded by private equity funds and whether the biggest players may be illegally colluding to increase their clout.

The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961

The Bible

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.

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